Hardware

Question

Windows SBS 2008 C: is full

What is the easiest way to copy windows sbs 2008 to a bigger drive. My current drive is full and is mirrored. I have a good backup drive and shadow copies. My question is, do I have to break the mirror before I copy the drive?

Reponse To Answer

Thanks for the reply,My system is a Dell server hardware raid with hot swap. I'm ready with 2- 500gbdrives ready to clone. I think I should pull one hot swap drive and break the raid.Then do a recovery from the dvd's and backup. Would this be correct?

I think it would be better to do a full Backup of the Array first

Use some sort of Cloning Utility to copy the complete OS to whatever Media you have present and then you can set about break the current Array but personally if this server is Important I wouldn't be breaking any RAID Array till I know I have a solid working Clone of the Boot Array.

Another thought

I agree with OH Smeg's answer (don't break what's working until you know your new array is running fine).

How big is the C: drive though? If it's less than 80GB or so then yeah you'd want to clone to something bigger. If you have a big C: drive though and its filling up then consider moving some stuff elsewhere. The SBS Console has wizards for moving WSUS data, user shares and the Exchange database. I always prefer to have this stuff off C: anyway, and it can consume a lot of space. Also check your IIS log files. These can take up tens of gigs. I run a script to clean out ones oler than 30 days personally.

Reponse To Answer

Thanks for the replies. My drive is 120gb and I have run all the wizards,deleted the log files, and used tree to rid files. As you suggest I will purchase a good clone software before I break the raid.Again I thank you.

I've used open source G4U & GPartEd

on DELL servers with PERC controllers. If you have spare ports attach your 500G drives, init as RAID 1, then use G4U to clone from 120G array to 500G array. Put 500G array first in boot order, reboot, and then run GPartEd to resize partition to make full use of 500G.

Per Col & GE you can never do too much CYA, so make sure you got a good backup :) Everything above should yield a recoverable drive at every step, but it never hurts to have good backups.

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